


more alive than you've ever been

by coraxes



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, DEAD FIC, Dishonored 2, F/M, Low Chaos (Dishonored), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Protagonist Billie AU, as in not finished and not going to be finished
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-04-30 12:36:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14497143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coraxes/pseuds/coraxes
Summary: “What did you do to me?”“I’ve made you a much bigger player than you should have been."The Outsider visits Meagan Foster the night before Delilah's coup.





	1. a long day in dunwall

**Author's Note:**

> first of all I'm not sure where this fic is going. basically I read a meta arguing that Billie should've been the protagonist of DH2; I'm not sure about that, but the idea stuck with me.
> 
> title is from "[dull life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGKefxnyT6E)." this seems as good a time as any to plug my [billie fanmix](http://thiefofeddis.tumblr.com/post/173012584298/deeper-than-any-knife-spotify-8tracks-billie), which i made with a fic like this in mind anyway.

**emily, now –**

Emily had her ear pressed to the study door when she heard a sharp _tap_ on the windowpane. At first she ignored it—she had to listen, had to find out what was happening—but it came again, louder this time.

She turned and saw a woman crouched on the window ledge.

If her place on a fifth-story ledge hadn’t given her away for a witch, the chunk of glowing grey stone in place of her right eye would have. Another _fucking_ witch, Emily thought. She had no idea what her expression was; her usual mask, never as good as her mother’s in the first place, had fallen away as soon as she saw Corvo turn to stone. Whatever the witch saw in Emily’s face, it got her to raise one gloved hand in an ironic little wave. Then she tapped on the window again.

Emily was trapped in this room. Her loyal guard was most likely dead; her father was frozen, somehow, not dead because she would find a way to fix him.

She was out of options and allies, and for some reason the witch was outside, obviously not making her presence known to the leaders of the coup. Whatever she had in mind, it was probably better than anything Emily could come up with at the moment.  She cast one last look at the door, then crossed the room and opened the window.

“Your Majesty,” she said in a low voice. Emily’s eyes narrowed. She was used to hearing her title said mockingly, but it stung now. The witch offered her hand. “Meagan Foster. I sent a letter.”

Cautiously Emily shook it. Meagan Foster looked more like a common sailor than a witch, with her plain blue shirt and dark canvas trousers; she could blend into any crowd if her eye were covered. “I never received one.”

“It was to Captain Mayhew, asking for an audience.” Meagan frowned. “I was going to warn the Royal Protector. Obviously, I was too late.”

“Alexi’s dead,” Emily blurted out. It was the only thing she _could_ say. She’d seen one of her oldest friends and protectors get murdered in front of her eyes, and all she could do was watch, half-unconscious and slung over Ramsey’s shoulder. “Corvo is—do you know how to turn someone back from stone?”

Meagan shook her head. “We need to get you out of here. I have a ship. Come with me and I’ll get us back out over the rooftops.”

Emily glanced out behind her. The nearest roof was nowhere within jumping distance; Emily had considered slipping out these windows herself, but no matter how she looked she could never find a safe route. But Meagan…she remembered the day of her mother’s murder, watching assassins disappear from the tower roof and materialize in the pavilion.

She could take the out. Get away from Dunwall Tower now and not look back. But…

“I need to see my father,” she said instead. The crackle of stone forming over him as he lunged for Delilah rang in Emily’s ears. Along with the slick, sharp sound of a blade sinking into Alexi’s stomach. _I need to pay Mortimer Ramsey a visit._

Meagan frowned. “Fine. There’s one guard patrolling outside this room and one downstairs. Not sure about the throne room. Your bedroom window is open, too—you know not to fall off the ledge?”

She _hated_ condescension, hated it even more now when she was reminded just how incompetent of an empress she had been. “It’s not my first time sneaking out of here,” Emily said, gritting her teeth to stop from saying something unwise.

Meagan raised an eyebrow. “Alright,” she said. “I’ll be here.”

**meagan, yesterday –**

“Billie Lurk,” the Outsider said, perching on an outcropping of Void-black stone.

Meagan stared around her, trying not to look as desperately scared and curious and hopeful as she felt. This wasn’t the Void as Daud had described it; he said it was blue and full of distorted pieces of the world around him, and that the Outsider floated there like a ghost. This world was less familiar, and this Outsider more human. Had time changed the Void? Or did it change based on who was looking?

“Haven’t used that name in a while,” she said. “What do you want?”

He disappeared and then reappeared beside her, pacing. Meagan hated pacing; it put her on edge, since she had to keep turning so that he stayed in her line of sight. “You know, for a long time I never gave my powers to aristocrats,” said the Outsider. “Instead I only gave them to the dregs of society. The rats living off a city’s scraps. Until Corvo Attano found himself in the company of men who would use him and then stab him in the back…that was too interesting to ignore.”

“Do you have a point, here?” No wonder Daud had always seemed so pissy when he came back from the Void; he liked to be the only one monologuing.

“Tomorrow night, after Emily Kaldwin is overthrown, I planned to give her my Mark. That could go any number of ways, some more intriguing than others. But then there’s you. The woman who had been with Delilah all those years ago. Who can’t shake off the guilt of it, no matter how much you try to leave that life behind you. Who will keep trying to stop the coup, even though you waited far too long to act.” He took one step out of her line of vision—disappeared—reappeared in flecks of black stone and smoke, right in front of her.

That was what he smelled like, smoke and seawater, one part of Billie’s mind noted. She tamped down on the instinct to step back, but then there was a hand over her missing eye, another one over the stump of her arm and it _burned_ —she screamed, tried to jerk away, but he was too strong for his skinny boy’s frame.

Then it was over. Billie stared—with _two_ functioning eyes now, not one, what the fuck—at the hand of floating bone and blackened flesh. The same arm that she had lost three years ago, but only part of it belonged to her now.  “What did you _do_ to me?”

The little shit smirked _._ “I’ve made you a much bigger player than you should have been. You’ll never be quite like one of my Marked. And you’ll never be the same.”

The Outsider disappeared again. Billie whirled, but he wasn’t in sight, and the Void was fading to grey around her. Still, she heard his voice again, close as if he were whispering in her ear. “I wonder if you’ll like that.”

**meagan, now –**

Learning to do a transversal again had been easy, although the markers she could leave and transverse back to without aiming had been a pleasant surprise.  Once she’d woken up, Meagan spent the morning transversing back and forth between decks, checking the wheel every few minutes to make sure she was still on course.  It felt _good,_ like the Void’s power was another limb she had regained after all these years. Her new arm and eye were freakish, but they worked fine. Even if her new fingers still seemed to twitch on their own.

(She wanted to hate the little bastard for changing her like this, but he wasn’t wrong. Meagan had spent the last decade and a half trying to blend into the crowd, but she had never managed to squash the part of her that wanted to be _special._ )

The foresight her new eye gave her was a little more difficult to grasp.  She did it on accident a few times, and finding herself floating over a frozen blue world was…annoying, to say the least. But it was invaluable once she got to Dunwall. The streets were crawling with watchmen and she’d learned to mark them.  If she turned her head, she could still see a few tiny yellow silhouettes prowling the streets of Dunwall; Meagan had thought those would fade with distance, but apparently not.

She watched through the wall as the empress, highlighted in yellow, made her way along the outside of the building (it would be almost funny if she’d fallen, the kind of ridiculous shitty luck that Meagan half-expected by now). Emily paced along the room, doing _something_ —rifling through cabinets? Then she halted, took two quick steps, and knelt in front of something.  Someone?  Emily stayed there for a moment, then picked up a piece of paper and a long blade that took on her golden highlight.

Meagan hoped Emily knew how to use it.

The powers were still new enough that it was bizarre to watch as the empress’s form choked out what looked like thin air from Meagan’s perspective. Once she descended the stairs Meagan made her own way through the window, transversing into the bedroom.

Ah, she thought, looking at the body near where Emily had crouched. Captain Mayhew. Judging by the ragged wound in her gut, she had not died quickly. Meagan was mostly surprised that Emily didn’t kill the guards outright. She may have been a shitty empress, content to sit in her tower and hide from the world turning around her, but after this coup Meagan wouldn’t have blamed her for letting out a little anger.

Movement flashed in the corner of her eye. Meagan turned, focusing on where Emily stood a floor below—the throne room, if she remembered right. The empress had her sword out; she sunk it into something just at her eye level, then slowly pulled it back.

 _There_ was the anger.

Meagan scavenged a few coins while she waited for Emily to rejoin her.  She climbed up the stairs a few minutes later, footsteps heavy on the wooden floor, bloodstained blade in her hand.  As she approached Meagan she did something and the blade folded up; Emily tucked it inside her coat. 

“Ready to go?” Meagan asked.

“One more thing.” Emily held out a ring.  The yellow cast to her face made her hard to read, so Meagan unmarked her.  “We should check out the safe room.  We always kept it stocked with supplies and money in case of an emergency.”

Typical. “We can’t drag the imperial reserves all the way to the docks, Your Majesty,” Meagan said, just barely keeping her eye from rolling. 

“I wasn’t planning on that.  But wherever we’re going, we’ll need money,” Emily snapped back. She had a point, so Meagan relented, but she could see the way Emily bristled as she unlocked the safe room.

Emily locked the door behind them and darted to the table where a gun, crossbow, and spyglass lay beside a skeletal mask. She clipped the bow and gun to her hips with an ease that spoke of practice; obviously the royal protector took his daughter’s self-defense training seriously.  If only she’d taken her _job_ that seriously—then maybe they wouldn’t be in this mess.

As Emily searched the room for valuables—even slipping a wooden boat into her coat, for reasons beyond Meagan—Meagan looked at the art on the walls.  Child’s drawings. 

Emily caught her looking at one. “Father put all these up here,” she said, a blush staining her cheeks. “I used to draw during my lessons…” She shook her head.

“They’re cute,” said Meagan. Well, except for the one she was looking at now: a masked man brandishing his sword at a burning building. Outsider’s blood, what a morbid kid the empress must have been.  She tapped the drawing with one finger. “I always wondered about the masked felon. Heard he was a witch, too.” The Outsider had said as much, but she wanted the empress to know she knew.

Emily bit her lip. “I think he might have been. During the coup, he attacked the guards—disappeared and then reappeared in thin air. She did something to his hand…he’s kept it covered since the first coup, but I remember when we stayed at the Hound Pits he had a strange mark on it.”

“He never told you?” _How stupid is this woman?_

Maybe some of that came through in Meagan’s tone, because Emily sounded defensive when she answered. “Corvo didn’t even tell me he was my father until I was sixteen. I wondered what the mark meant but never asked. I thought if he needed me to know, he’d say so.”  She looked at Meagan, then at her gloved hands.  “Do _you_ have a Mark?”

“No.” Emily raised an eyebrow expectantly; Meagan sighed.  Might as well share the obvious, she supposed.  She was keeping enough secrets as it was.  So she pulled off her glove and rolled down her sleeve, showing the empress her Void-touched limb with its exposed bone and strange metal wiring.  “I lost the arm and the eye a few years ago.  The Outsider gave them back along with a few perks.”

Emily stared.  Meagan had expected disgust from a woman raised in luxury, but instead she just looked fascinated.  Maybe that was why Sokolov found her so interesting.  Her fingers twitched as if to reach forward; then she curled them into a fist.  “Why did he choose you?”

There was bitterness there.  Meagan shrugged.  “Who knows why the little shit does anything?  Let’s get going, Your Majesty.  We’ve been here long enough.”

Emily frowned, but opened the door out of the safe room anyway.  She snagged an old Sokolov painting of the Pendletons as they made their way down the corridor to the small balcony overlooking Dunwall’s streets.  Weird that it’d be there—all three of the Pendleton brothers had fucked her over.  Maybe that was why it was hidden up here, where no one but Emily and Corvo could get to it.  The whalers used to throw darts at paintings like that.

“Alright,” said Emily, looking over the city, “you said you could get us back over the rooftops?”

Meagan nodded.  She’d been uncertain before—it wasn’t like she had time to case the tower, and she hadn’t been in Dunwall since Daud told her to get out of town.  But some things, like the city’s close-set roofs, didn’t change in so short a time as fifteen years.  “You’re going to want to hold on,” she said, holding out her Void arm.  Emily looked at her, eyebrow raised, and uncertainly took Meagan’s hand.  Meagan bit back a smile.  She’d find out quickly that _that_ wouldn’t do—but first Meagan could have a little fun. 

She squinted and raised her hand.  A flickering marker appeared on the shingles below them.  Well within Meagan’s range, but she didn’t want Emily to get badly hurt on her first trip.  She clenched her fist and transversed; the Empress’s weight pulled her sharply back, but Meagan held on until they crossed the distance. 

Emily staggered, bumped into Meagan, and the rebound nearly had her falling back before she caught her footing again. “ _Fuck,_ ” Emily snarled, so un-empress-like that Meagan snickered.  Emily glared and smoothed back the hair that had fallen from her tight updo.  She was so obviously trying to hide her emotions, and so obviously angry.  At Meagan, at Delilah, who knew? 

“Maybe you should hold on a little more tightly,” Meagan suggested.

“You’re not carrying me,” said Emily.

“Piggyback?”

The empress’s hand twitched toward the blade she had folded inside her coat.  But neither of them could come up with a better idea, so Emily got up on a nearby air duct, wrapped her legs around Meagan’s waist, and slung her arms around her shoulders.  Carrying her whole weight was a struggle, but Meagan managed.  “Settled, Your Majesty?”

Emily made a grumpy noise that Meagan assumed meant _yes,_ and they were off.

The rooftops took them a few blocks from the tower, but before long they ran into a problem.  “What’s the matter?” Emily asked when Meagan hesitated at the edge of one roof, trying to find a spot to aim her transversal.

“The next rooftop over is too far away.  We could jump and I could try to make it from there, but if we fall, we’re dead.”  She grimaced; Meagan would have preferred to do this clean.  Maybe without the empress’s weight she would have tried the jump—she had certainly done more stupid things to get away from the city watch—but right now, it wasn’t worth the risk.  “Our best option is to get on the other side of the street, where we have cover.”

“How can you tell?”

“What?”

“That it’s too far away.  You keep—” Emily’s left hand swung in front of Meagan’s face; she wiggled her fingers and then clenched her fist in demonstration.  “What are you doing?”

“Um.”  Meagan didn’t actually know why she used that gesture, only that some part of her mind knew it was the best way.  It had been the same way with the tetherings and transversals she learned from Daud.  “It’s just a way to channel it.  It’s hard to explain, but there’s a marker that appears when I’m aiming.  If I aim too far away, it just doesn’t show up.  And then I just—transverse, I guess.”

“Huh.”  Emily shook her head, careful not to hit Meagan as she did so.  “We should get to the street, then, you said?”

“Yeah.”  Meagan leaned over the edge of the building.  There were a few conveniently-placed balconies she could transverse to; people might be able to spot them through glass doors, but it wasn’t a big concern.  The docks weren’t far, and once they reached the _Wale_ they’d be hard to catch.  “Hold on.”

“I’m holding—” said Emily testily, the rest of her words lost to the rush of air as Meagan transversed again.

They got to a second-floor balcony; Meagan waited until none of the watchmen were looking their way, transversed to the middle of the street, then ran and dropped into the alley running alongside the road.  Above them, a watchman leaned against a railing.  Meagan carefully set Emily down on the pavement, eased herself onto a dumpster, and looped an arm around the man’s thick neck.  She yanked him back as she squeezed his throat, careful not to fall over. 

There was a rush of air and a swirl of fabric around her.  Just as the watchman stopped struggling, Emily vaulted from the dumpster, over the railing, and through the small garden.

“ _Emily!_ ” Meagan hissed, but it was too late.  One of the watchmen she had marked earlier was just outside the garden.  She bit her lip and ducked below the railing—maybe Emily would stay out of sight—

“Hey!” the marked watchman shouted, drawing his sword.

_Shit._

Meagan raised her hand to transverse to a higher vantage point, but instead of the familiar magic of a transversal, she felt…something else.  Blue-violet magic swirled around the unconscious watchman in Meagan’s arms.  His face seemed to peel away, revealing a layer of black stone; her own form seemed weirdly heavy, like she had put on a thick coat.  When she looked down at her hands, they were pale and broad.

What Void shit was this?

A pistol fired above her, and Meagan decided that whatever it was, it was handy. 

She swung over the railing.  Four of the city watchmen were chasing Emily down the street.  None seemed to care about her, so Meagan drew her voltaic gun and fired to the side of them.  The shot pinged noisily against the stonework.  “She’s got backup!” Meagan yelled, and the guards turned to look behind them. 

The moment of distraction was all Emily needed to roll into a side alley.  Meagan drew on the Void again to mark her—she hadn’t come all this way to lose track of the empress—and saw that thankfully, the alley she’d ducked down was free of watchmen.

Unfortunately, when she came back to herself, whatever magic that had let her steal the watchman’s semblance was gone.  Meagan was standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by the city watch.

“Uh,” said Meagan. “Afternoon, gentlemen.”  She reached for the Void again, but her well of power felt dry.  A marker appeared just past the watchmen, a deep violet cord linking it to her, but whenever she clenched her fist and tried to transverse she got only a sharp pain at her temples.  Dammit—she should have planned for this.  How many times had Daud scolded her or one of the others not to overuse their abilities?  How many times had a whaler been shot because of dumb shit like this?

“Get her?” said a watchman.

“Get her!” another agreed, much more loudly, just before a crossbow bolt whizzed through the air and into his leg.  The man screamed and Meagan ran, to the docks this time, ignoring the guard and throwing herself into the water.  Bullets sunk in after her and she dived deeper, pushing past the pull of water against her clothes.  Yellow flickered at the edge of her vision; she turned to see Emily diving into the water ahead of her.

Well, Meagan sure wasn’t going to let the girl beat her to her own ship.

She reached for the Void one more time, just in case, and somehow the power was there again.  This transversal came easily, putting her in Emily’s path.  Meagan surfaced, took a quick gulp of air before the watch could see her, and then ducked back under.

Finally, soaking wet, her heart pounding from lack of oxygen and eyes streaming from the foul saltwater, Meagan pulled herself up onto the _Dreadful Wale—_ the far edge, where the watch wouldn’t be able to see her.  Emily surfaced moments later.  Meagan grabbed her by the collar and yanked her up.

Emily had gotten them spotted, nearly gotten them killed, because she’d decided to rush ahead too quickly.  She’d saved Meagan’s ass.  And now Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin, Empress of the Isles, looked like a drowned rat.  Her clothes were soaked, her makeup was running down her wan face, her long hair was hanging half out of its knot.  Her jaw was set like she expected Meagan to snap at her.

Instead Meagan found herself laughing like she hadn’t done since the last time she’d heard one of Sokolov’s fucking awful dinner stories.  She doubled over, clutching her stomach; tears streamed down her face with the saltwater.

“What,” Emily snapped.

“That was _good,_ ” Meagan choked out, and made herself breathe.  She might have gone past _happy_ and straight into _hysterical,_ for a moment, but—why not.  “Outsider’s crooked cock, that was good.  I forgot how—” _how it felt in the old days,_ she almost said, and remembered that Emily didn’t need to hear about the old days.  Close calls with Overseers and watchmen alike, pulling Rinaldo’s or Galia’s or Thomas’s asses out of trouble.  The looks on their stupid faces when you surprised them and the rush of adrenaline in the middle of a fight.

 _Fuck,_ she’d missed that.  Meagan had tried so hard to leave the whalers behind, she had forgotten why Billie stayed with the whalers in the first place. 

Emily blinked at her, and then a slow, sly smile spread across her face.  “Get her?” she said in a mockingly-deep voice, and set Meagan off again.

She forced herself to calm down after a moment.  “We’ve got to get you out of here—c’mon, it won’t take them long to figure out where we went,” Meagan said.  The _Wale_ was far enough out that the watchmen wouldn’t check there for a while, but she wasn’t a fast ship; by the time they got to Karnaca, the Grand Guard would be expecting them.

Emily nodded and hauled herself over the railing.  Meagan transversed onto the deck, then to the helm. 

Two weeks, Meagan guessed.  She’d made the trip from Karnaca to Dunwall only once, but she figured it would take about two weeks.  She just had to figure out what to make of the Empress, keep her secrets safe, and keep them both from going stir-crazy.  Their faces would be plastered all over the city by the time they got there, which would make docking tricky, but she was a smuggler; she could manage.

Meagan pulled off her gloves and let her hands settle into the familiar rhythm of steering her ship.

**an old man, ten days later—**

The posters went up only days after news of the coup reached Serkonos.  Alongside the expected portrait of the empress—hardly necessary, he thought, her face was on every coin in the empire—were posters of a ship captain. _Meagan Foster: Wanted for Treason, Smuggling, and Other Crimes Against the Empire,_ it said.

It was a good portrait. Lurk gave him and the rest of the empire a fuck-you glare from the poster. She’d like that, or she would if it weren’t such a damn inconvenience. When posters with Daud’s face decorated every block in Dunwall, she used to complain about only getting shown in a whaler mask. “I’m a damn sight nicer than an old man.”

Fifteen years later, she still was—Lurk looked older, yeah, but good _._ Though he had to wonder about that thing in place of her eye.  Lurk had always been fascinated with witchcraft; what had she managed to get herself into this time?  Why was she with the empress?  Trying to make up for that old alliance with Delilah?

Lurk had been out of his life for longer than she had ever been in it.  He didn’t know what she had become since she left the whalers.  Maybe he never really knew her in the first place. 

Still.

No one was watching, so he pulled out the pins, folded the poster carefully, and stuck it in his pocket. 

He had never been one for nostalgia; all he had left of the old days were a few bone charms and a wristbow, too well-made to give up.  Those were the only things he scooped out of his apartment before he left another part of his life behind, humming an old whaling song, feeling lighter than he had in years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i couldn't think of a way to have billie call displacing "displacing"--i figured she'd say transversals since that's what the whalers called teleporting. but i did think of a very bad joke reason and it goes like this:
> 
>  **emily:** hey when you displaced earlier--  
>  **meagan:** why do you call it that?  
>  **emily:** well, first you're in dis place,  
>  **meagan:** ...  
>  **emily:** and then you're in that place  
>  **meagan:** get off my ship
> 
> anyway!! comments and kudos are very much appreciated.


	2. edge of the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this is kind of short & transitional. what can i say--edge of the world is a transitional level. things should start picking up next time around, but I didn't feel like rehashing a ton of exploration.

**meagan, now –**

As soon as Meagan left Dunwall, her dreams took a turn for the worse.  The return of her arm and eye had brought with them the memory of losing them to the grand guard; those turned to nightmares about the Overseers dissecting her arm and progressed from there.

Meagan woke in the middle of the night a week after the coup.  This time Delilah had her pinned to the wall, her lips against Meagan’s neck while she stuck a wooden gazelle into Meagan’s eye.  She lay awake, her flesh eye closed and her void eye staring at the ceiling, for too long; then she rolled out of bed and made her way down to the kitchen. 

Just when she started to fill the coffee pot with water, she heard something from Emily’s room.  A whimper.  Meagan paused and used her foresight to check on her, but the empress was alone.  “Corvo, please,” she heard a moment later, then, “ _Mother!_ ”

Meagan scowled down at the pot.  Of course recent events would drag up more than just her old hurts. 

Emily hadn’t gone to the Golden Cat easily.  One of her flailing fists had struck Thomas right on the edge of his eyepiece, leaving a curved, bruised cut on his face and Emily’s knuckles bloody.  At the time, Billie had resented the girl.  This was a kid who had lived in luxury her whole life while the rest of them beat each other over food scavenged from dumpsters.  Who gave a shit if she had to slum it for a few months?

Not much had changed there.  It had taken a long time for Meagan to regret what she had done to a helpless little girl.  When she left Dunwall she told herself it was only to save her own skin, that she had no regrets besides her betrayal.  The denial wore thin after a few months.  Maybe she hadn’t left because of regret, but once she was away from the whalers, once the camaraderie wore off and it was just Meagan alone with her thoughts—then she had had to reckon with what she had helped do.

Now, though, Emily wasn’t helpless.  She should have seen this coup coming.  She would have if she had bothered to leave her tower.  If it was just Emily who had to pay for that it would be one thing.  But Meagan had seen Serkonos erode into dust since Duke Luca had taken over with the crown’s full support.  She had seen Dunwall’s gutters run red and watched as Delilah’s turncoat guard had gunned down people in the streets.  And those were just her first steps.  Who knew how many would die because of the coup? 

Even if Meagan and Anton waited too long to warn Emily, she should have known.  She should have _cared._

There was a muffled shout from the next room.  Meagan sighed and deliberately knocked a sturdy iron pan off the counter.  It clattered to the floor, loud enough to make her wince; she set it back on a shelf, knocking it into a few other pans as she did so.  Then she filled her pot with enough water for two, set it on an eye, and flicked on the gas flame.

The sound coming from Emily’s room had stopped, and when Meagan used her foresight to check on the woman again she was staring up at the ceiling.  She heard Emily’s mattress shift just as the water started to boil.

“Hey,” she said, not turning as the empress’s footsteps announced her presence.  “Sorry about that.  Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s fine.”  From the corner of her eye, Meagan saw her stretch.  “Is that for tea?”

“Coffee.”  Meagan took the pot off the burner and stirred in a few spoonsful of grounds.  “Should be ready in a few minutes, if you want some.”

Emily nodded, rubbing her eyes.  Meagan leaned against the counter.  She was used to comfortable silence, but with Emily the silence always felt charged, like she needed to either start an argument or start confessing.  Either option was embarrassing, so Meagan held her tongue. 

Still, she was grateful when Emily asked, “How did you start travelling with Sokolov, anyway?”

Meagan smiled despite herself.  “It’s a long story,” she said, and Emily fixed their coffee while she told it.

**meagan, one week later –**

Instead of docking the _Dreadful Wale,_ Meagan hid it in a disused station.  With a price on hers and the empress’s heads, bribery wouldn’t be enough for the guard to look the other way at Campo Seta.  And if she had to cross the whole district before she got to Addermire station—well, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

Blood humming with that old energy, Meagan had spent most of her downtime on the trip from Dunwall planning the best way in and out to the station.  Getting to Addermire seemed simple enough.  Only guards were allowed on the carriage, but as long as she could duplicate that face-stealing trick she should be able to bluff her way in.  There were two problems with the rest of the plan.  For one thing, she was too recognizable now.  It was too much to hope that she would be able to stay out of sight the entire time she was in Karnaca.  If she had a normal face, people might be willing to overlook her—normal citizens tended to second-guess themselves—but Meagan’s Void eye was too obvious.  For another, once she got to Addermire there was only one way out.  If she screwed up her entrance to the carriage, she could come back to face a bunch of angry guards at the station.

The best solution she could think of for the first problem was to wrap bandages over her eye, like when she had first lost it.  It was a pain—she hated having the blind spot—but her foresight went through it fine, at least.  And there were plenty of people who had lost eyes in the mines or the factories; her injury wouldn’t stand out.

As for the problem of her exit…

“Why don’t I take the skiff out to Addermire?” Emily suggested.  She had asked for a rundown of the plan just before Meagan had planned to leave.  Meagan was shaking her head before she finished.

“The whole point of this is to get you back on the throne.  Unless you’ve piloted a skiff before…” From the pinched look on Emily’s face, she hadn’t.  “You’ll be a sitting duck out there, and you’re too recognizable to bluff your way past any of the guard that might check you out.”

Emily nodded once, sharply, then left to go wear circles in the deck with her pacing.  She’d been strange and testy all morning.  Nerves, perhaps, or just frustration that Meagan got to leave the ship while she was stuck in hiding.

Still, she gave Meagan an idea.  She pulled out a rough map of Addermire she’d bribed off an old nurse and made a note next to the docks.  Even if nothing went wrong with the carriage, it was nice to have an extra option.

Then she rolled down her sleeves, tucking them into her gloves, and pulled on her coat, grimacing at the extra layers.  Meagan already felt grimy with sweat, and she hadn’t even stepped into Karnaca’s afternoon sun.  Times like these she missed Gristol—at least when she had been running from the city guard, it had been _cool._ But she couldn’t shed her layers like she had on the boat.  Covering her eye would do no good if people noticed bits of her arm were floating. 

“I should be back by tomorrow,” Meagan told Emily on her way off the _Wale_.  “It might take a little longer depending on how bad-off Anton is—if I need to get him to a doctor, I’ll send a note.”  She didn’t say what would happen if Anton was dead because he—well, he _could_ be.  The world didn’t like to play fair with the people Meagan Foster or Emily Kaldwin cared about; Anton was doubly doomed that way.  But there was a chance he was alive.  Dwelling on the alternative was pointless. 

Emily leaned against the railing.  Her sleeves were pushed up past her elbows; after two weeks on the ship, dressed in some of Meagan’s clothes because her own were in dire need of a wash, she looked more like a sailor than the ruler of an empire.  In an odd way, it suited her.  “And if I don’t hear from you?”

“Great question,” Meagan said dryly.  What _would_ Emily do if Meagan failed here?  Meagan supposed if she died, she wouldn’t have to worry about it.  “I’m sure you’ll figure out something, Your Majesty,” Meagan said, and transversed off the boat.

She took the carriage as far into North Campo Seta as she could, getting off at an abandoned depot.  A guard patrolled just outside the station; Meagan waited until his back was turned and transversed to the roof of a nearby shed.

Then she paused, looking at the guard.  There was no one else around; nearby Meagan could hear the normal sounds of the city, rats scuttling through the alleys, water flowing through ducts, but this little corner was almost abandoned.  And she _had_ wanted to practice her new ability—she’d called it semblance, for lack of anything better.  It seemed too risky to practice on Emily.  Meagan hadn’t been able to figure out if that Void stone that the mimicry left on the watchman’s face was permanent, and didn’t want to take that chance.

So she waited until the guard’s patrol route took him near the shed and held out her arm, drawing on the Void.  This gesture was different than the others, a claw she made in midair; the guard froze mid-stride, flakes of color peeling off his face and flying to Meagan’s outstretched hand like metal filings to a magnet.  When it ended, the guard collapsed, and Meagan saw a ghostly mask of black stone in her hand.

“Shit, kid,” she muttered, just in case the Outsider was watching. “Do you always have to be so…gruesome?”

Still, the semblance had worked.  Meagan waited, trying to time how long she had before the Void energy ran out and she returned to her normal face, but she couldn’t feel the power draining out of her no matter how she concentrated. 

Meagan slid off the roof and walked a few steps to the guard’s form— _there_ went the slow drain of power, as soon as she started moving.  Perhaps as long as she stayed still, she’d be able to keep her borrowed shape?  That was something, at least.  She poked the guard’s face with her Void hand and found that it felt normal, even in places where black stone seemed to have grown over his features.  So she _probably_ wasn’t permanently maiming people.  Thank fuck.  She would hate to see _those_ headlines.

She moved the guard just past the shed, out of plain sight, counting her steps all the while.  Overall this semblance shit seemed like it could come in handy—she could have really used it for assassinations, once upon a time.

Meagan might use it for assassinations _now._ The thought made her stop in her tracks.  Up until now her plan had been vague: rescue Anton, find out how Delilah got to power, find out how to make her mortal, get Emily back on the throne.  But it wasn’t as if she planned on sharing a friendly handshake with the Crown Killer or Breanna Ashworth, was it? 

She didn’t _mind_ the thought of killing them.  The Crown Killer was an animal, whoever they were, and Breanna Ashworth was more refined but just as vicious.  It was only…strange.  Meagan Foster had killed in self-defense, but she hadn’t been an assassin.

It seemed as if the past was determined to haunt her, lately.  She half expected to see Daud step out of the shadows.

Meagan rolled her eyes at herself.  Then she transversed back to the rooftop—swore as the transversal destroyed her semblance, the mask splintering in her hands—and continued down the road.

Karnaca seemed more on edge than usual, Meagan thought, as she walked the streets with her head down.  There was barely a minute where she didn’t hear the soft strains of whalesong coming from a bone charm or rune; that was another gift Meagan hadn’t possessed since she left the whalers, so she didn’t know how common the things usually were, but it still seemed as if every apartment was home to a heretical artifact.

At the same time, posters from the overseers urging people to turn their neighbors in for torture if they suspected occult magic were stuck to every building.  Some had been vandalized with the usual treatment (dicks, mostly), some with calls to join a gang called the Eyeless, but they were still there.  News from the capital had affected people in different ways, it seemed. 

Meagan wondered how long it would be before Delilah tried to destroy the Abbey entirely.  Fifteen years ago, after tipping the overseers off about Daud’s hideout, Delilah had come back to the manor and spent an hour fantasizing about making paint from the High Overseer’s blood.  Billie had spent most of the time rolling her eyes and trying to form her own revenge fantasies: Daud kneeling in front of her, her blade at his throat; rallying the whalers with her own brand of brusqueness and a promise that she would be strong where Daud had been weak.  Her mind had kept shying away from what would come between the two images.  Eventually Billie had given up and started pulling at Delilah’s clothes.

Meagan broke into a couple of abandoned apartments through open windows and grabbed their bone charms—nothing too special, but worth having, she thought as she tucked them into her belt.  Their songs settled into a familiar hum at the base of her spine.

There was an awful lot of whalesong, Meagan noticed, coming from an old bathhouse.  When she used her foresight to look into it she couldn’t get much past the door, but she saw them glowing through walls and floors.  “What’s in there?” she asked a likely-looking woman tending a nearby market stall.

“Not from this part of town?” the woman asked, frowning.  She looked middle-aged but was probably younger, her face weathered by the sun.

Meagan shrugged.

 “New gang moved in there a few months ago.  The Eyeless.  Started having fights in there and running a betting ring.  I hear they give out magic items to the winners.  That’s the _last_ thing we need around here if you ask me.”  She shook her head, lips set in a prim line.  “Well—the last thing besides a grand guard raid.  ‘Least the Eyeless only shoot if you give them a reason.”

The warning was clear in the woman’s tone.  Meagan commiserated politely, then took her leave.  She gave the old baths a quick once-over, but it seemed to be shut down for the day; maybe once Anton was back on the _Wale,_ she could give the place a visit.

For now, Meagan squared her shoulders and set off on the hot, dusty trek to Addermire station.

**emily, a few hours later –**

The heart thumped steadily in Emily’s hand as she lay on her bunk, staring at nothing.  She squeezed it every now and then, listening to her mother’s voice.

“Why do so many have so little?  It was never meant to be this way.”

“I hear laughter.  Somewhere, there is still merriment and song.”

When the heart went silent Emily wondered if she was imagining the whole thing.  If she imagined the dream last night, the boy with the black eyes and his not-quite-smirk.  “ _Poor, neglected Emily.  I’m a friend of your father from the bad old days.  I think you’ll do quite enough without my mark…but there’s one piece you’re missing if you want to kill Delilah.”_

Emily didn’t know why she didn’t tell Meagan.  Perhaps because Emily wanted a secret of her own.  “It was not her hand that held the knife,” her mother had told her when she had pointed the heart at Meagan’s retreating back.

What knife? Emily wondered. Was it another whaling blade, like the one she had seen Meagan attach to her belt before she set off?

She squeezed the heart again.  “One day this ship will flood.  Five days later, she will make it a pyre.”

Again.  “He let him go. Why was he allowed to go on when I was not?”

Emily froze.  She looked down at the heart as if the distress in its voice would manifest in the wire and sinews.  But it looked the same as ever. 

The floor creaked outside her room.  It was a soft sound, nothing she would pay any mind to in ordinary circumstances. Now, Emily lifted the heart again and squeezed.  “He has lived in shadow for many years. But he wonders if it is time to stop hiding.”

Soundlessly Emily slipped from her bunk and edged open her door.  She peered around the corner and movement flashed on the staircase.  Emily whirled—but there was nothing. Not even footsteps.  She held out the heart and squeezed it again: “This used to be my world,” her mother whispered, and Emily ignored the pit the words opened in her stomach, turning back to her room.

Then she noticed that the door to the workspace was swinging, as if someone had just pushed through it.

Emily eased the door open, eyes narrowed as she scanned the room. Everything looked just as she remembered it—everything except for a small white corner poking out from underneath Meagan’s locked cabin door.

She knelt on the metal floor and snatched up the scrap of paper.  There was no seal, no address, no signature, just a hastily scribbled note. Emily read it, jaw set; then she slid it back under Meagan’s door, nudging with her fingertips until it was out of sight. 

The _Dreadful Wale_ was too quiet, Emily decided. What she needed right now was a nice long walk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, comments and kudos are appreciated, especially since this is such a rarepair!


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